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Friday, October 28, 2011

I had my geek credibility called into question this week. My job has me writing about celebrity culture, whether I care about it or not. But this particular assignment didn’t bother me: Heidi Klum’s awesome Halloween costumes. Yes, the woman who doles out cutting insults on Project Runway with that unnerving sort of German jolliness. She has a quirky seasonal pastime, and it’s showing up her famous friends every Halloween. Last year, she donned a particularly elaborate costume, which she described as “an alien transformer.” Speaking as someone who prides himself on pop culture knowledge, I can say that that isn’t a thing, this alleged “alien transformer.”

Here’s the costume:

As you can see, she’s rocking stilt legs and not falling on her ass — an admirable feat on Halloween or any other day — but it’s curious the fact that her generically sci-fi costume is paired with that of her husband, Seal, who is obviously the Marvel Comics superhero Silver Surfer. Granted, it’s a loincloth-clad version of this character that’s not flaunting his bulge to the world in the way he did in the second Fantastic Four movie, but even a novice Marvel fan would be able to recognize his costume.

When I wrote about Klum’s 2010 Halloween, I noted this strangeness — the Silver Surfer posing next to some sort of vaguely alien, apparently non-Marvel entity, and looking more like a fiery-colored cousin to the alien diva from The Fifth Element than anything else. I, apparently, was wrong. People with keener eyes for comic references instantly recognized Klum as a female version of Galactus, Destroyer of Worlds. For comparison’s sake, please observe his in-the-book incarnations:

So I’m curious: How obvious is her costume to you, my geekily-minded readers? Granted, the side-by-side association with the Silver Surfer should be a dead give-away, yet it never occurred to me that Klum was an actual character and not some kinda-sorta hodgepodge that Klum arrived at by watching the middle of several famous sci-fi movies. Based on her description of her costume, she might not have realized that she was actually one particular thing instead of an original creation, but I suppose I should have.